NVIDIA’s GeForce 20 series Pascal GPUs are poised to feature higher clock speeds and faster memory chips, Volta GPUs to support HBM2 & GDDR6. The company’s plans for 2017 and 2018 are quite significant and we have infamous leaker Ishimura to thank for giving us a glimpse into NVIDIA’s GPU roadmap for next year and beyond. The same person who gave us detailed information about the company’s next generation Volta GV104, GV102 and GV110 GPUs a few months back has come back on the Chinese Baidu forums to talk about the upcoming GeForce gaming graphics cards coming in 2017 and 2018.

One of the most interesting bits leaked is that NVIDIA would actually introduce a GTX 2080 Ti based on the GP102 GPU powering the flagship Titan X instead of a GTX 1080 Ti as previously thought. The new card would completely replace the GTX Titan X, deliver better performance and sell at a significantly lower price.

There are also plans to replace the existing GP104 based GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 cards with higher clocked variants and bringing GDDR5X memory to a GTX XX70 class card for the first time. It’s not yet clear whether a potential GTX 2070 would also feature more CUDA cores than the existing 1070. However the clock speed bump and faster memory is believed to be enough to create a more competitive and appealing product than the existing offering from the company. The GTX 1080 would also get replaced by a faster “GTX 2080” variant.

The GeForce GTX 2080 is expected to deliver around 10-15% more performance compared to the card it’s replacing and sell for $499 at launch, making it a good chunk cheaper too. The GeForce GTX 2070 is also expected to be around 10-15% faster than its predecessor and launch at around $349.

WCCFtech

GTX Titan X

GTX 1080

GTX 1070

Architecture

Pascal

Pascal

Pascal

GPU

GP102

GP104

GP104

Memory

12GB GDDR5X

8 GB GDDR5X

8 GB GDDR5

Memory Speed

10Gbps

10Gbps

8Gbps

Memory Interface

384-bit

256-bit

256-bit

Memory Bandwidth

480GB/s

320GB/s

256GB/s

Launch

2016

2016

2016

GeForce GTX 2060 Ti, 2060 & 2050 Also In The Works

GP106 and GP107 based graphics cards like the GTX 1060 and newly released 1050 Ti and 1050 are rumored to get a refresh as well. The new cards are said to feature the same GPUs but with higher clock speeds and faster memory. The brand new GeForce GTX 2060 Ti and GTX 2060 graphics cards will succeed and replace the existing GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB and GTX 1060 3 GB offerings from NVIDIA in the mid-range.

The refreshed parts are rumored to land sometime in the middle of next year, more towards the end of the summer and beginning of the back-to-school season. The GTX 2060 Ti and GTX 2060 are both expected to feature 6GB of GDDR5 memory and the same 192-bit memory interface. They’re also expected to launch at even more affordable MSRPs compared to their older, departing siblings.

NVIDIA’s refreshed $200-$300 GeForce 20 series graphics cards are expected to go head-to-head with AMD’s brand new Vega 11 GPU. Vega 11 is AMD’s entirely new mid-range GPU based on the new V9.0 graphics architecture. The GPU will feature second generation High Bandwidth Memory and has been designed from the ground-up to be both faster and considerably more power efficient than AMD’s current Polaris 10 based RX 480 graphics card.

Little is known about Vega 11 other than it’s expected to replace Polaris 10 next year. It’s projected to deliver more than 7 TFLOPS of single precision compute compared to the 480’s 5.8 TFLOPS all the while coming in at a lower TDP than 150W. NVIDIA’s refreshed GP106 GTX 2060 Ti and 2060 would face fierce competition from AMD’s Vega 11 should they launch next year.

NVIDIA GeForce 20 Series Pascal Refresh (Rumored) Lineup:

Graphics Card Name

GPU Core

CUDA Cores

Clock Speed (Boost)

Memory Bus

Memory Type

Memory Clock

Expected Price

GeForce GTX Titan Black V2

GP102 Pascal Refresh

3840 CCs

~1600 MHz

384-bit bus interface

GDDR5X

12 GHz

$1200 US

GeForce GTX 2080 Ti

GP102 Pascal Refresh

3384 CCs

~1700 MHz

384-bit bus interface

GDDR5X

10 GHz

$799 US

GeForce GTX 2080

GP104 Pascal Refresh

2560 CCs

~2000 MHz

256-bit bus interface

GDDR5X

12 GHz

$499 US

GeForce GTX 2070

GP104 Pascal Refresh

2048 CCs

~1800 MHz

256-bit bus interface

GDDR5X

10 GHz

$349 US

GeForce GTX 2060 Ti

GP106 Pascal Refresh

1280 CCs

~2100 MHz

192-bit bus interface

GDDR5/GDDR5X

8-10 GHz

$229 US

GeForce GTX 2060

GP106 Pascal Refresh

1024 CCs

~1900 MHz

192-bit bus interface

GDDR5/GDDR5X

8-10 GHz

$179 US

GeForce GTX 2050

GP107 Pascal Refresh

768 CCs

~1700 MHz

128-bit bus interface

GDDR5

8 GHz

$139 US

NVIDIA Volta To Support GDDR6 & HBM2 Memory

Moving beyond 2017, Volta is set to replace the Pascal refresh in 2018. The new GPU architecture will be based on a more refined version of TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process. The new architecture will, just like Maxwell before it, focus on pushing the performance per watt envelope without the help of a die shrink, using the same basic process node as its predecessor.

Little is currently known about the Volta architecture itself. However the company, we now know, is planning to introduce Volta GPUs paired with HBM2 as well as GDDR6 memory. GDDR6 chips rated at 16Gbps are expected to boost memory bandwidth by 60% compared to current GDDR5X 10Gbps memory chips, which the company is leveraging in its Titan X & GTX 1080 cards.

GV104 represents Nvidia’s bread & butter Volta gaming GPU. The company will target the popular ~$400 segment with a cut down variant version of the chip and the high-end with a fully enabled variant. According to what we know the company won’t veer much from what we’ve seen it historically do with its 104 class chips. GV104 will replace GP104, the chip that powers the current GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 cards, and the very same chip that will power their refreshed variants in 2017.

GV104 based graphics cards, i.e. GTX 3080 & 3070 cards will feature 256-bit memory interfaces with 16GB of GDDR6 memory running at 16Gbps for a total of 512GB/s of bandwidth, 32GB/s more than what’s available to the 384-bit GTX Titan X.

The GV102 chip will replace GP102, the chip that’s expected to power the GTX 2080 Ti and currently powers the GTX Titan X. GV102 will be the fastest gaming chip NVIDIA has to offer in the Volta stack. GV110 on the other hand is built purely for the professional market. Think AI inferencing, deep-learning & datacenter workloads. The chip will be larger and more expensive than GV102, it will feature significantly better double precision compute and HBM2 memory rather than GDDR6. The top-end server grade Volta cards are expected to feature 32GB of HBM2 & 1TB/s of memory bandwidth and debut sometime in 2018.